The Kids Built It Faster Than We Could Explain It

Hey everyone,

A lot happened since the last one, so we’re just going to get into it.

Drew and Kevin Carney were both just named to the Charlotte Business Journal’s 2026 Power 100: Visionaries, the list of 100+ people the paper says are actually moving this city forward.

CBJ asked Drew what bet he’s making right now. Here’s what he told them: “This year I founded CLT Startup House, Charlotte’s first startup house, on one bet: proximity creates collisions, and collisions create breakthroughs.. It’s a century-old home in Dilworth where founders build side by side. I run an AI company, and I think the AI age makes in-person community more valuable, not less. Anyone with a laptop can build a company now, but most people build alone and need others to spark the creative, unexpected ideas. Charlotte’s next great companies will be built by these people.”

That’s the whole reason this house exists, in his own words.

Kevin’s been part of this world too. He co-founded Kingsmen Software and ran it as managing partner until it was acquired by Atlanta’s Sparq, then started Statesmen Consulting to help small and midsize businesses actually use AI instead of just talking about it. When CBJ asked what drives him: “We’ve always had a bias for action over theory. Our favorite quote comes from Ben Franklin: well done is better than well said.”

Two people out of this house, same list. We’ll take it.

On Friday, September 4th, forty kids, parents, and teachers from Elysium School of Innovation took over the house for the morning. Donuts, a house tour, the whole thing.

Drew and I walked them through what the house is before anything else: a hundred-year-old home where people who are “betting on themselves” come to build, instead of doing it alone. Then we got into it.

Drew handed them a different way to talk to AI first. Most people use it like a search engine: ask one question, get one answer, do the rest yourself. He told the kids to skip that part. Give it the whole job, tell it to plan the thing out, build it, test it, and fix what breaks. That’s the difference between asking a favor and directing an agent.

Then we showed them how to actually push back on what it hands you. we ran this exact prompt for the day, right in front of the room: “Consider the following: what might cause this plan to fail? What unintended side effects or consequences do we need to factor in? Is there anything else we should be considering to ensure success?” The rule after that: read the whole plan before you approve it. If you don’t understand it, it’s not ready, and that’s the AI’s problem, not yours.

Then everybody picked their own game, whatever they were into, and ran it through the same process on their own devices: interview yourself about what you actually want, make Lovable write the plan, argue with the plan, then build and test what it hands back. Drew got out of the way.

One group had a 3D racing game running, with real handling and everything, in under 20 minutes. Another built a retro two-player basketball game. Another built a full open-world dragon RPG. A lot of these kids had never touched a line of code, using the free tier of a tool, before lunch.

Six days later at House Jam IV, Drew put the kids’ work up on the screen for the whole room, then closed with the challenge that’s still making the rounds: “I hope the next time we do this, we have crazy, crazy things that we’re putting out here. That’s what we want to see.” We want 10 or 12 stories like that out of the house by the end of the year, the kind that make people outside Charlotte stop and look at what’s coming out of here.

I'll add my own version of that. Watching a room full of kids build something real before lunch made it clear the tools were never the hard part, it's the permission we're all waiting on that nobody's going to hand us. Consider this yours.

That’s the whole reason this place exists. That’s why House Jam happens. It’s why Collision Wednesdays happen. We’re here to challenge each other, push each other, and share what we’re building, so Charlotte builds better, together.

Wed, Sept 16, 5:00-8:30pm — Worth Their Time: Building with Gamma. Alvaro Meléndez’s workshop for anyone who has to make something people are supposed to actually read: a pitch, a proposal, a launch page. Bring one real project and leave with it done.

Thu, Sept 17, 6:00-8:00pm — Discernment in the Age of AI. Jeneba Wint brings her tour to Charlotte first, a fireside with Drew about knowing when to let AI help and when the judgment has to stay yours.

Thu, Sept 24, 9:30-11:00am — Founder Led Growth Workshop with Elena Kacan and Drew. Elena walks through building your brand as a founder, then turns it around and roasts Drew’s own social presence in front of everyone. A few volunteers get their own accounts audited live.

Wed, Sept 30, 5:00-8:30pm — Worth Their Time: Gamma and Claude Code, part two of Alvaro’s series. Everyone builds one real automation for their own job. No coding experience needed.

There's a new podcast out of the house: Builders of Charlotte. It's Drew Burdick of StealthX, Charles Dandrea of Botsource, and Alan Corvalis and Colin Thornton of Torta Studios, four founders building AI companies in Charlotte, all bootstrapped, all still in it, sitting on the porch at the house talking about what's actually working and what's kicking their butts.

A couple things that stood out: nobody gets to opt out of AI literacy anymore, no matter what you handle in your company. And personal productivity with AI isn’t the same as product reliability, once you hand a workflow to somebody else, every gap you’d been quietly correcting for all day shows up at once.

Three episodes are up now, with more coming.

Here’s what stuck with us from the Elysium visit: those kids didn’t have years of experience or permission from anyone. They had a room, a tool, and someone willing to show them the loop once. That’s basically the whole model of this house, just with better coffee and worse handwriting.

Until next time,
Chris

P.s. What are you building, and what are you building it with? Reply and tell us. You might be the next story in this newsletter.